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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHEN BEING GAY MEANT GOING UNDERGROUND  
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John Self
June 25, 2024
The Guardian
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_ These beautifully written letters, diary entries and extracts from
novels, skillfully edited by Peter Parker, add up to an essential
study of postwar gay life. _

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Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1945-1957
edited by Peter Parker
Penguin Classics
ISBN: 9780241370605

In May 1945, the British photographer John S Barrington was
celebrating the end of the second world war in his own way. He pushed
through “the crush in Piccadilly Circus, kissing every soldier,
sailor and airman I could meet”, before rounding things off by
deciding to “pick up superb sailor, take him to office and fuck him
‘silly’”.

This is the striking start to the lively first volume of _Some Men in
London_, an anthology of gay men’s experiences in the mid-20th
century collated by Peter Parker, whose previous books include
biographies of Christopher Isherwood and JR Ackerley. It’s a
multi-format chronology of underground practice and public discussion,
its title deriving from the _News of the World_’s declaration that,
although homosexuality was present throughout England, “for the
black rotten heart of the thing look to London’s golden centre”.

 

It comprises diary entries, letters, newspaper reports, extracts from
novels and more, on a subject so alien at the time to polite society
that many couldn’t even agree on what to call it. Conservative peer
Earl Winterton said “homosexualism”, an internal Metropolitan
police report applied the dainty tongs of a hyphen
(“homo-sexuals”), while others opted for “pansies”. Winterton,
a few years later, thought better of his linguistic liberalism: “I
prefer the word ‘pervert’ to ‘homosexual’,” he said in the
Lords in 1959, “because ‘homosexual’ is too friendly a word for
these horrible people.”
But the public profile of gay men was increasing, partly through
famous cases such as John Gielgud
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arrest in 1953 for “importuning men”. (“A bloody, bloody fool”
– Noël Coward
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in his diary. “Human dregs” – John Gordon in the _Sunday
Express_.) Elsewhere, the tone is moving. An anonymous letter to the
_New Statesman_ from one gay man said “to live in this world without
affection is insupportable”, while novelist James Courage fretted
about his relationship with a man 25 years his junior. “There’s no
fool, as I say to myself (as my mother used to say) like an old
fool.”

 

There are lighter moments too, like the wide-eyed report in the_
People_ newspaper in 1950 into “why Britain’s three most eligible
bachelors, Ivor Novello, Terence Rattigan and Norman Hartnell, can’t
find love”. “I’d rather free-lance, as they say,” was
Novello’s explanation. And occasionally sincerity reads like satire,
such as the same paper’s report five years later declaring that “a
campaign against homosexuality in British music is to be launched”.
Two qualities make an anthology stand out. The first is the quality of
the extracts. There is exceptionally good writing here from, among
others, Denton Welch, James Lees-Milne
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trade and the only writer who could create beauty from a diary account
of his jailbird lover masturbating his beloved alsatian, Queenie.

The other key quality is the editing. _Some Men in London_ is
skilfully sequenced, juxtaposing Henry “Chips” Channon
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casual ledger-card accounting of his conquests with sobering reports
on arrests of working-class gay men, or following an extract from
William Douglas Home’s 1947 play _Now Bar__abbas_… with the
_Evening Standard_’s hostile review (“the normal section of the
audience giggled with embarrassment”). In those days the lord
chamberlain’s role as theatre censor still existed, and
homosexuality could be featured in plays only “to ventilate [the]
vice and its tragedies”.

Parker has an irresistible style of his own in the notes that
punctuate the extracts. “Sending homosexual offenders to prison,”
he observes, “provided them with opportunities to continue the very
pursuits that had landed them in court in the first place.” After a
letter from MP Nigel Nicolson turning down involvement in the
Wolfenden committee to consider changes to the law on homosexuality
(“the position in my constituency is an extremely delicate one”),
Parker adds that given “Nicolson had both homosexual parents and a
homosexual brother, and had himself been in love with another man as
an undergraduate, it was not only his position in his constituency
that was a delicate one”. He also provides enlightening and
entertaining biographies of the major contributors to the anthology.
(The absence of an index, though, is bizarre.)

The Wolfenden committee reported in 1957 and its study, recommending
decriminalisation of consensual homosexual acts, became a bestseller.
That its recommendations would not be enacted for another decade is
not surprising – a few years earlier the home secretary, David
Maxwell Fyfe, had declared: “I am not going down in history as the
man who made sodomy legal” – but the tide was beginning to turn.
The change in the law will be covered in _Some Men in London_’s
second volume, which takes us up to 1967 and will be published in
September. I’ll be counting the days – this is one of the best
anthologies I have ever read.

* Gay life
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* England
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* post WWII history
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* LGBTQ literature
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